Mark Lawrence is married with four children, one of whom is severely disabled. His day job is as a research scientist focused on various rather intractable problems in the field of artificial intelligence. He has held secret level clearance with both US and UK governments. At one point he was qualified to say ’this isn’t rocket science … oh wait, it actually is’. His debut fantasy novel Prince of Thorns (The Broken Empire #1) released in the U.S. on August 2.
Spiders have too many legs, but it’s not about quantity, it’s about quality. Millipedes have way more legs and they’re not the stuff of nightmare. Spiders have long articulated legs and they sit in the middle of them waiting to scurry. The horror lies in the way that they move, and the way in which they are still. Possibly, to someone lacking the gene for the primal fear we arachnophobes possess, it’s as hard to understand a fear of spiders as it is to understand a fear of table legs . . . but you guys are just wrong in the head. Every decent human is afraid of spiders. It’s in the bible somewhere. I expect.
In any event, although spiders are rightly held by honest folk to be scary, they are not particularly scary in fiction. Moreover, even with my bone-deep revulsion of the beasts I have been far more scared and more scarred by people, even the unremarkable common-or-garden school bullies of my childhood left a greater impression on me. Which brings me to my perhaps disappointing conclusion that the most chilling monsters in fiction aren’t giant arachnids, kraken from the depths, daleks, or aliens of the face-hugging kind, they’re just people. It takes imagination and understanding to be a real monster. Nasties with too many legs or too few may butcher us efficiently, or in slow bizarre fashion, each according to their kind, but what scares me most is the man next door, ordinary in all respects save that one small piece of his mind is broken. That man (or woman, or curious child) shares so much of your experience, knows how we humans work, where our horrors lie, what hurts, what humbles, what deconstructs. He comes bringing his own fears to project across the canvas of your skin. The greatest cowards can be the cruellest of creatures. And they know about the spiders.
For me Stephen King writes a good monster. I’m struggling to remember any book that’s ever made me properly scared – I’m more visual fear-wise, film is the medium for fright, but King’s IT has probably come closest. And even there it was less the psycho clown monster in the storm drains than the town bully, suffocating a dog in a discarded refrigerator, that put the chill in me. Men again. Us.
I’ve been told I write a decent horror scene but if that’s true I couldn’t really say how I do it. I guess I just try to scare myself. I put myself in the scene and say ‘what would freak me out at this point’ then do that. Except I don’t put a spider in because I can’t rely on my reader to be a wuss like me.
Paul (@princejvstin) on September 4, 2011
There are a couple of roleplaying games where there are no “monsters” to be fought, where all the conflicts are with people. Those games make the explicit point that other people (which can be a loosely defined thing in these games, but I digress) are the real monsters that, say, orcs are only a symbol of.
Longasc on September 4, 2011
Phobias are supposed to have a healthy evolutionary cause: Fear of a large animal with claws is not the worst first reaction.
But spiders? Maybe they trigger fear because they are so alien. Everyone knows that they don’t do terrible things unless they are black widows or tarantulas and in a movie. In which they are usually oversized to trigger even more fear.
It is indeed frightening how people with perfectly normal lives and looks, perfect sons-in-law, turn out to be the real monsters. That’s also why scammers are always so friendly and looking nicely. You can have the best intentions if you have a gangster visage people will automatically assume you are one.
So what’s the scariest thing in the world? Meeting a friendly scammer with a gangster visage at night in a moist sewer who has spiders crawling all over his body and they are suddenly moving towards YOU!
tara roane on September 4, 2011
i agree man is the greatest of our fears, like mark im terrified of spiders but ive watched spiders on film they give me the creeps, but what scares me the most are strangers, the capacity man has to do the unknown to be nice one moment and something terrible the next, my 80 year old neighbor shot his wife, that scared me more then anything. it gave tongue to the fact that one never knows what a man is really like or really capable of, we all walk in masks and what is underneath is known only to us.
Greg Lincoln on September 4, 2011
Have to agree with you about man being the most frightening in fiction. I’m reading IT for the first time right now and though the creatures are viscerally fear inducing it’s more the cruelty the characters suffer at the hands of the people around them that affect me most. I was the object of bullying in school and that fact has shaped many of the relationships both personal and business in my life. I always ran or coiled tight and rode things out and never fought back.
Now I fear the actions and thoughts of others more then I fear things that go bump in the night and I actually read horror novels quite often. I’m a coward in real life in many ways and that is both my fault and the fault of those cruel people from my past.
Greg Lincoln on September 4, 2011
In terms of fiction monsters and fear I think that for me it is pretty situational… I read a good deal of horror fiction and the things that really frighten me other then those stories that question reality based on our dependence on our perceptions (one of my all time favorite movies is In The Mouth of Madness…) it depends.
Right now because of IT my monsters are the human ones Luke Bev’s hubby’s Tom the abuser and the trio of bullies of Derry of 1957-8…. Pennywise is be comparison a figure of gross horror more a characicture then scream horror….